Friday, November 17, 2006

To understand why the West seems so weak in the face of a laughably primitive enemy, its necessary to examine the wholesale transformation undergone by almost every advanced nation since World War Two. Today, in your typical election campaign, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much every party in the rest of the West are all but exclusively about those secondary impulses: government health care, government day care, government paternity leave. We've elevated the secondary impulses over the primary ones: national defense, self-reliance and reproductive activity. If you dont go forth and multiply you can't afford all those secondary-impulse programs whose costs are multiplying a lot faster than you are. Most of the secondary-impulse stuff falls under the broad category of self-gratification issues.

Indeed, the political player in Canada is compelled to utterly and abjectly recant any deviation, large or small, from the politically correct agenda of patronizing socialist and defeatist cant. Witness Dave Burghardt's humiliating and useless apology in the face of the dominant Canadian culture of surrender:

Burghardt says he's "truly sorry for a number of things I wrote … some of the things I wrote cannot be excused. I take full responsibility for any pain I have caused."

[…] In his letter, he points to his comments about Muslims, which he says showed his ignorance. He says he wants to learn more about the faith and its quest for peace.

Burghardt should have let his balls hang out… instead he withdrew them at the first little boo of political correctness.

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comments:

The seriously sophisticated American government has created these laughably primitive but horrifically effective enemies in the Middle East, by creating and then propping up their atrociously corrupt governments with staggeringly gigantic amounts of money and weapons.

Getting out of the Middle East and desisting from ripping tax dollars out of Western people's hands and using them to grease oil contracts out of sheiks is not "defeatism". It's called "minding your own business".

Speaking of which, "reproductive activity" is no business of government whatsoever, neither primary, secondary nor tertiary. If we don't breed, and the population is flat or declines this will cause no harm to anyone or anything, except the welfare state. Because it is the welfare state which needs exponentially larger and larger numbers of taxpayers to survive. A free market, fueled by human ingenuity and the innate capacity for hard work and foresight, can adapt to any size of population. But the welfare state can't adapt - it grows until it collapses into a pit of war, famine and genocide. Which, I'm afraid to tell you, George Bush and the neocon apologists of the Mark Steyn school are doing their best to accelerate.

Yes,Anon.I noticed the way they propped up the governments by invading Iraq and sentencing Saddam to hang.No?That wrong too?So let me get this straight:Resisting is wrong.Acquiescing is wrong.Whatever we do we are wrong.What do you think is right?

With all respect, Anonymous, your comment would have been noteworthy if it had been relevant to the post. You have misunderstood the terms "retreat" and "defeatism" in their context and substituted your own. Perhaps citing Mark Steyn confused you; nevertheless, I think of Steyn more as a cultural critic than a political one, except so far as politics shapes and is bent by culture. He's not a libertarian precisely, but nowhere have I ever come across any suggestion that he thinks that reproductive activity is the business of government.